Cameron’s crusade and the ‘sexting’ generation

When a president or prime minister personally announces a new moral crackdown, rather than leaving it to the justice or home affairs secretary to announce a law proposal or action plan, you know something is afoot: either there is an election not far away, or a need to divert public attention from intractable economic problems, or perhaps a runaway media-stoked moral panic is making it imperative for whoever is in charge to look like a leader not a follower.

While British Prime Minister David Cameron need not face the electorate until early 2015, it has been speculated that his recent declaration of a triple-pronged attack on internet pornography was an attempt to bolster his flagging appeal to women voters; if so, he will need to worry about antagonising male ones, as this is an issue deeply split on gender lines. And, as the likely impact of Cameron’s policies on children and heretics alike will be significant, we too will need to pay attention to gender.

Cameron’s proposals, announced in a speech to the NSPCC, one of the most aggressive lobby organisations against “child sexual abuse” in the UK, were as follows:

Opting-in: By 2014, all UK Internet users would be required to register, or “opt-in”, for access to porn sites. Failure to comply would mean being automatically blocked from such sites by filters which would have to be installed.

Search terms aimed at finding child pornography online would be blacklisted by the police with a view to Google and other search engines blocking them.

Possessing depictions of simulated rape would be made illegal. This would include online access to them.

The easiest of these three prongs to sell politically was of course the one avowedly aimed at curbing paedophilia by blocking access to child porn. Technically, as many were quick to point out, it is not so easy. In addition to requiring the reluctant cooperation of the big internet corporations, the search terms themselves would be a challenge: while an expression like “hardcore Lolita” or “xxx Lolita” might be thought unambiguously to indicate a search for one thing only, what about plain “Lolita”? Would even Cameron want to ban access to literary critiques of Nabokov’s classic novel? It was also noted that most child porn is accessed through peer-to-peer networking rather than through ordinary searches. Nevertheless, I do not doubt that search-term blocking of this kind would have a tremendously oppressive impact on younger minor-attracted people in particular. An easy prediction is that it would have the effect of making any juvenile eye-candy, no matter how mild and legal, appear be out of bounds, a message that would be reinforced, we were told, by “splash screens” sternly warning searchers they were trying to find illegal material and, by implication, letting it be known Big Brother was watching them. This would only succeed in promoting anxiety, fear and depression in those targeted, while doing absolutely nothing to stop any real child abuse.

As for the simulated rape measure, this would extend recent legislation against “extreme pornography” (sections 63 to 67 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008) and appears to be in response to concern over an alleged explosion of rape porn recently. I have no idea whether this really is a rapidly expanding phenomenon, but the possibility is not to be dismissed lightly. In recent weeks, and possibly as a “backlash” against steadily growing female power in society, there have been some disturbing signs of truly vicious misogyny in Britain. One woman was subjected to a torrent of graphic rape and death threats for the heinous crime of campaigning to have a female face – that of novelist Jane Austen – featured on the £10 bank note. A female member of parliament who supported her came in for similarly vicious trolling. This is horrible, totally inexcusable, behaviour perpetrated by a minority of extremists, but I suspect it reflects a much more widespread feeling among men that feminism in general has gone far enough and that the specifically anti-sexual agenda of a powerful strand within feminism has gone much too far.

Against this background, let us now consider the remaining prong of Cameron’s proposals, the opt-in measure. This was far and away the most controversial idea, prompting a storm of debate, with a great many men, especially, in fierce opposition. In one newspaper’s online poll voting against the measure was running at treble the strength of support for it when I looked. While freedom of expression was always going to be the salient rhetorical trope in this, the fact that men rather than women are keenest on such freedom where porn is concerned suggests that the underlying battle is over male sexuality per se, not just over who is allowed to see what.

The rationale for the opting-in measure was child protection, of course. Forced to declare themselves as porn users if they wanted to access porn online, many might be deterred from opting in; and if fewer people allow access to porn on their computers, fewer children will be exposed to it. A key part of the theory is the belief that children are “innocent” and have no interest of their own in online sex – or, if they do, it is a sign of their “corruption” and must be stopped. As might be expected, such views were implicit in a recent report by the NSPCC on juvenile “sexting”, but some of the findings from focus group studies commissioned for the report were interesting nevertheless.

Up to a point, the researchers did the right thing for a change: they actually spoke to kids, rather than their parents or teachers. They went into schools and asked youngsters aged 13-14 directly about their experience of sexting. There was also some focus group work with younger kids aged 10-11 but this was less revealing as the researchers lost their bottle: they did not dare, or thought it “inappropriate”, to ask them directly about sexual issues, preferring to stick to “aspects of digital life”. As for what sexting means, the researchers said it “describes the use of technology to share personal sexual content”, which might mean text, or still photos showing partial nudity, or explicit video of full-on sex. The most common means of sharing were said to be mobile phones, Skype and social network sites.

A key finding, in the words of the report, was that “sexting is part of young people’s lives and it is not something that is shocking or surprising to them. All of the attendees in the groups were aware [of] instances of sexting among their peers…” When prompted by a guess that 50% of 14-year-olds had seen pornography most boys felt this was a massive underestimation, with one boy declaring “there is no boy in this year that doesn’t look at porn”. And the boys did not think they had been harmed by it. The only thing that really worried them was being caught using it by disapproving adults. As for how they used sexting, boys described it as a tactic in the dating game: they would ask a girl for a sexy photo of herself as part of establishing their interest and getting a relationship going. The researchers judged that boys seemed not to view practices around sexting as predatory and malicious: they were just “trying their luck”.

None of this need surprise us. The picture is a far cry from innocence in need of protection. As regards the younger kids, the researchers failed to uncover any scandal needing to be addressed by censorious measures: their “digital life” apparently did not include being exposed accidentally to porn or to unwanted sexual propositions.

As I said, though, we need to pay attention to gender. In the words of the report, “Girls, in general, had a negative impression of pornography and felt it influenced boys in terms of both expectations of how females looked and also what they viewed as ‘normal’ sexual activity.” However, that does not mean they are uninterested in sex and the erotic. The report also said, “an interesting discussion with girls that showed a gender difference was to explore whether they had read ‘erotica’ such as 50 Shades of Grey. While those admitting reading such books were in a minority, it was certainly something that had touched these girls’ lives and it was something they were happy to talk about.”

So, what should we make of this? Feminists tend to scream blue murder over men who ask their partners to shave their genitals (making them look more like little girls!), try a bit of ass-fucking and generally do it like porn stars. And they resent the fact that men are less keen on women who are fat, ugly and frigid. But is it so unreasonable for men (or boys!) to “try their luck”? In modern society, thanks not least to feminism, refusal is always an option, as proven by the fact that few boys, or even men, get anything like as lucky as they might wish!

We have to distinguish, do we not, between the feminazis who want to impose their own man-hatred on all girls and women, on the one hand, and more reasonable concerns on the other. Misogyny and cyber-bullying are unpleasant realities, as noted above. Sexting by teenagers can and has resulted in tragic cases of suicide after sexual images have been re-posted on social media sites along with abusive comments. The question then becomes, what do we do about it? Cyber-bullying seems at first sight the perfect argument for repressive policies such as those proposed by Cameron, which would have us sweep all public expression of sexual interest under the carpet, and repress all sexuality outside of “loving and committed relationships” in adulthood, giving no scope whatever for youngsters to have any kind of sex life, even with their peers. Indeed, any form of sexual activity between two 15-year-olds or younger peers was explicitly made illegal in 2003 in the UK.

There is a better way than Cameron’s, though, starting (so far as public policy is concerned) not with teenagers but with kindergarten kids, and not with sexual repression but with learning the socially acceptable expression of sexuality. That, however, must be for another day.

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I’m digging up this old topic because when you mentioned queer theory it suddenly occurred to me that you probably don’t know — why should you? — that the Internet is overflowing with romantic and pornographic stories written by young women. They are a subset of ‘fanfiction’: stories, often pretty terrible, written as a hobby, that use characters and settings from published books and from TV shows and films. That is how 50 Shades of Grey got started: it was Twilight fanfic. Twilight is that awful vampire romance. I had a friend who was seriously into Dr Who and got involved in this whole…you can almost call it a virtual subculture. It’s quite fascinating.

Many fanfic porn stories feature opposite-sex couples (‘pairings’) or sometimes threesomes, foursomes, etc.; some feature female-on-female hanky-panky (‘femslash’); but a very great many feature male-on-male (plain ‘slash’; nothing to do with urine, but a reference to the / in Kirk/Spock, because apparently this all got started among female Trekkies in the 60s). Not just written stories either: lovingly hand-drawn art; film clips carefully spliced together to create a whole new storyline. Why so much male-on-male? Partly, I think, for the same reason that many straight guys like ‘lesbian’ porn: two (or more) people of the preferred sex and none of the non-preferred sex. But also, to play armchair psychologist, the young women writing these stories probably tend to be quite geeky and introverted, and that makes them quite likely to have trouble finding sex and relationships and also to have anxieties around gender roles, body image etc. that they find it easiest to work out at one remove, through characters who are of the opposite sex to them. The immense amount of energy that they put into creating porn of their own for themselves and each other also suggests to me that typical video porn and soap opera romance storylines don’t do a lot for them.

I’ve been saying young women, but in fact many are younger than that. This study http://ffnresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/fan-fiction-demographics-in-2010-age.html found that of several thousand FanFiction.Net members registering in 2010 and choosing to reveal their age and/or sex, 78% were female and 80% aged 13-17, with the average age being 15.8. One woman on MetaFilter says she’s been involved in fanfic since she was 12. Another says “When I was in grade 8 [age 13-14], I wrote a bunch of slash/spy/sexy coup d’état fanfic featuring my best friend Susan and the Prime Minister of Canada.” Well, that is certainly imaginative. A young adult on the Tintin Livejournal group says she has been writing slash since she was 11. As is customary, she introduces her stories with a brief summary, after which you can click on the link to the story, or not. One summary reads: “Tintin is a catboy and Captain Haddock is a werewolf. They’re on an adventure together and in the meantime Catboy!Tintin goes into heat and Captain Haddock has to wrestle with both his emotional, human feelings for Tintin and the unbearable animal urge to mate.” (Somewhere a bit of my childhood goes up in smoke.) This story is labelled MPREG, for ‘male pregnancy’. It’s a kind of warning notice. If you are grossed out (‘squicked’) by the idea, you don’t click. It’s also common to give stories ratings, usually following the Motion Picture Assocation of America’s system: G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17. Many of those NC-17s will have been written by people under 17!

I mention the Tintin/Captain Haddock story because it’s intergenerational. Tintin is a teenager, Captain Haddock much older. Stories of this type abound. Beyond the summaries I don’t know what is actually in them, as I have never read one and won’t be doing so in the future. I strongly recommend everybody else follow suit. As far as I know such writings are currently legal in most jurisdictions, but that could change, and in any case you never know what somebody’s going to decide to make trouble over. But I know such stories abound because I have read about them in various places, the Fanlore wiki for instance. According to the Harry [Potter]/[teacher Severus]Snape page: “Snarry wasn’t initially popular in the Harry Potter fandom at large. Because Harry was underage (or just barely of age) in many stories, and because Snape was in a position of authority over Harry, many fans claimed that all Snarry stories were non-con [non-consensual], even the schmoopiest [most gooily romantic].” However, ‘Snarry’ stories and artwork later took off in a big way. As for Snape/Hermione: “The teacher-pupil relationship can be a barrier to some fans, and many SS/HG stories involve an adult Hermione; other fans see it as a turn on.” And so on and so forth.

There is also a thinky side to fanfic/fandom (as in ‘domain’ or ‘kingdom’, not domination/submission). People in this part of fandom tend to be a bit older, some middle-aged, and they have a lot of fun playing around with tropes. There is a website called TVTropes that will swallow your whole afternoon if you are not careful. People attracted to this side of fandom also tend disproportionately to identify as something other than cis and het: queer, bi, pan (pansexual), ace (asexual), genderqueer, etc. There can be long, involved discussions about intersectionality and privilege and representation. Nonetheless, most people who are seriously into this stuff are women or girls and most are attracted to men to some extent. Some gay men object quite strongly to slash fiction, which they perceive as a fetishistic, ignorant and demeaning use of their sexuality by straight women. One gay male MetaFilter poster points out that there are many more straight women than gay men, which arguably puts the gay men in a vulnerable position in this set-up, and that if “what can you do, teenage boys will be teenage boys” doesn’t fly, then neither should “what can you do, teenage girls will be teenage girls”. A female poster replies that it’s not fair to hold erotica created by women to a higher standard than that created by men — just how realistic are ‘lesbian’ porn videos, after all?

In that last article, we read: “One LiveJournal user named ‘omen-chan’ acknowledged once being victimized by a pedophile, but nevertheless warned that the mass deletion went too far. ‘Pedophilia is disgusting, and I can understand deleting these’, the post said. ‘However “shouta” is simply fiction written about two underaged boys getting together, usually in a non-graphic way. There is absolutely nothing illegal in that. Fourteen-year-olds hook up together all the time. It’s called high school.’ ” Nothing illegal in that for how much longer? What will happen to all these enthusiasts if the law changes?

>I’m digging up this old topic because when you mentioned queer theory it suddenly occurred to me that you probably don’t know — why should you? — that the Internet is overflowing with romantic and pornographic stories written by young women. They are a subset of ‘fanfiction’

I have certainly been aware of fanfiction, which I think you* and Jasmine have talked about here if memory serves, and I am not at all surprised to learn “the Internet is overflowing with romantic and pornographic stories written by young women”. Thanks for the detail though: it helps to have good informants!

>I mention the Tintin/Captain Haddock story because it’s intergenerational. Tintin is a teenager, Captain Haddock much older. Stories of this type abound.

What is also very interesting, is the censorious response to allegedly “non-con” stories, which reflects the tyranny of PC in the campus “rape culture” activism.

I don’t have any hard data on this, but if I were betting, my bet would be that younger writers are more accepting of intergenerational stories. That’s the general impression I get. Not surprising: they probably experience themselves as having sexual agency, and forget, or edit their memories, as they get older.

WRT censorious responses: a dig on the Fanlore wiki yields this page on Harry Potter fanfic archive FictionAlley: http://fanlore.org/wiki/FictionAlley. Founder Heidi Tandy says: “[in] I think, 2004, we had a couple of the long time FictionAlley users who decided that we shouldn’t be hosting any fics that contained bestiality, intergenerational ships, or underaged ships. Basically we got into a debate with some of the users who wanted us to bad [ban?] all of these things because they felt it was unbecoming for their stories to be hosted on a site that hosted such illicit and atrocious topics. Obviously we took the American Library Association position that, as long as a story had an accurate summary, you know, the same way that books should have their content summarized on a flyleaf or on the back so that people know what a story is about in vague terms, that we weren’t going to ban any topics or any discussions as concepts from FictionAlley, you know, we were going to continue our position of hosting everything, you know, as long as the grammar and spelling was reasonably okay. There’s probably 250 posts on that thread, just it’s a really interesting sort of slice of discussion within fandom circa that time.”

There’s also a link to this Livejournal page http://pearl-o.livejournal.com/1202580.html?format=light in which the poster defends her/his “underage kink” and protests against a ban on “underage” stories from an LJ community that accepts stories about everything else, apparently including rape, scat, vore (vorarephilia) etc. “I’m so tired of people with their kink shaming on underage fic” replies someone else.

Today’s insanity:
Rational comment escapes me, other than to say clearly it is deemed horrific for children to ‘explore’ themselves anymore. The days of doctor-nurse and ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ are long gone.

Haha! How wrong could I be, thinking ‘yes’ means ‘yes’. It does of course mean ‘”provisional yes, depending on my age and my country of residence and my current financial, hormonal, neuronal and chemical balance.”

On sexting: it’s not unheard of in the US at least for kids to be charged with or threatened with charges of making child porn for taking sexy pictures of…themselves. I just came across two posts from a feminist blog on one such case:

Cheering news indeed. The mere title ‘Yes means yes’ sounds more positive and less confrontational right off. I’m always so dismayed by the feminist ‘slut marches’ etc – the ‘no means no’ brigade – um, hello, yes, I’m educated, I do know what ‘no’ means, thanks girls. The implication is that all males are latent (if not active) rapists, and it makes me furious, drawing battle lines between the sexes as it does. If they’re afraid of giving out too ‘liberal’ a message with ‘Yes means yes’, then they could call themselves “No means no and yes means yes”. That’s seems fair enough, and pretty damn clear. I know this is a bit of diversion from the ‘sexting’ topic, but wanted to get it off my chest. The ‘No means no’ brigade have been the seed for so much that’s gone wrong with the public perception of eroticism in recent years, between adults, between young, and between adults&young. The upshot is that men are more confused than ever what ‘consent’ is, and might be inclined to give up seeking up: at this rate, it will need to be in writing, and signed by a lawyer before embarking on a cuddle and a kiss.

The upshot is that men are more confused than ever what ‘consent’ is, and might be inclined to give up seeking up: at this rate, it will need to be in writing, and signed by a lawyer before embarking on a cuddle and a kiss.

Yes, and those engaged with philosophy and the law appear to be very happy about it! Good for business, you see! David Archard’s book Sexual Consent makes consent seem mind-boggingly complicated. I haven’t read Andrew Wertheimer’s Consent to Sexual Relations, but I think you’ll love the way the Amazon blurb neatly reflects your point:

When does a woman give valid consent to sexual relations? When does her consent render it morally or legally permissible for a man to have sexual relations with her? Why is sexual consent generally regarded as an issue about female consent? And what is the moral significance of consent? These are some of the questions discussed in this important book, which will appeal to a wide readership in philosophy, law, and the social sciences. Alan Wertheimer develops a theory of consent to sexual relations that applies to both law and morality in the light of the psychology of sexual relations, the psychology of perpetrators, and the psychology of the victims. He considers a wide variety of difficult cases such as coercion, fraud, retardation, and intoxication. We can all agree that ‘no’ means ‘no’. This book suggests that the difficult question is whether ‘yes’ means ‘yes’.

The edit; I got utterly confused there (late at night). I thought the sentence was not grammatically correct, hence I wanted ‘not’ put in. But now I see it was ok as it stood, because I started the sentence with ‘none of them’. Sorry for that bollocks, and cluttering up your page already. I hope I’ve made some makes sense. Uh, yes. let’s leave religion out of it.

I would like to introduce myself here, having come across this blog when surfing for articles relating to the Jeremy Forrest case. ‘All the world loves a lover’ hit me as one of the best, wittiest (but highly serious) and articulate pieces of writing on any subject ever (I’m a creative writer and musician and appreciate these things). As I speak, I’m fresh out of a debate I had with some of my Facebook ‘friends’, in which I dared to question their ‘abuse-ethic’. This was particularly in relation to the recent 13yo-offers-fellatio-for-a-smoke case (she has no name of course, but the guy most certainly does, or at least did, if you get my meaning). I may offer my full critique of their arguments to this blog if it would be of interest (I did a breakdown of Judge Lawson’s statement on FB recently), but for now I summarize its essence here, and it will give you a feel for what happens if you try to go toe-to-toe with your standard ‘anti-abuse’ campaigners. You get, well… ‘abused’:

“NO no no no no a 15yo CANNOT consent – a 16yo can – but NOT if she’s at school – a 13yo definitely has no clue what she is thinking or doing AT ALL, ever – and if she does it means she is already abused – and if she is already abused it means any man who encounters her is an even bigger abuser, guilty until proven slightly mitigated in which case we’ll surround the courtroom and get them to impose the sentence WE want – all men are rapists – sex is the spawn of hell – ‘affection’ is ‘grooming’.”

Sometimes they do stop for a breath, although they don’t hear anything in that instance, least of all a ‘counter-argument’.
[disclaimer: any word I use bearing resemblance to religion was entirely coincidental. none of them are remotely religious, that being another thing they persecute in all its forms, especially its benevolent ones].

Good to see you here, Phil, and thanks for your appreciative comments. Comments on the newest blog tend to be noticed more than new comments on older blogs, so for other readers I might just add that you have also just posted on “How to take a vacation from yourself” and also the “About” page. By all means send further posts. Brevity is appreciated (your present post is good). Not sure what point you are making about religion though.

Thanks. I have just checked out a few of the comments on this site. As you say, most of them are sensible and interesting. This one was a stand-out for me:

“However, in recent years, what pops up is a lot more hyper-violent (women appearing to enjoy getting choked) and/or graphic (a lot of closeups of penetration, DP, oral, etc). It’s not just a nude lady holding her breasts and looking stupid/sexy. It’s violence and close-ups of body parts, not sex.”

This is a real issue. If I were a parent of young kids I would be worried about it, on account of the violence, not the close-ups.

“Feminists tend to scream blue murder over men who ask their partners to shave their genitals (making them look more like little girls!), try a bit of ass-fucking and generally do it like porn stars. And they resent the fact that men are less keen on women who are fat, ugly and frigid.”

This is very easily flippable. A lot of men resent, and scream blue murder over, the fact that women are less keen on men who are fat and ugly and reluctant to perform cunnilingus, for instance.

Also, I don’t feel that “frigid” is a useful term. One set of reasons is that plain old standard-model penis-in-vagina intercourse is often nowhere near as enjoyable for the female as for the male partner, and that the female partner is the one carrying the major burden of the risks — and no matter how many precautions you take there are always risks — of pregnancy, injury and infection. It’s anatomy. Nobody’s fault. But it’s understandable that a woman might be leery of all this while her male partner is raring to go.

“In modern society, thanks not least to feminism, refusal is always an option…” But of course, if you refuse, you might get called frigid. On the other hand, a cheerful and enthusiastic attitude to sex can get you branded a slut. It’s a tightrope that girls have to walk. When these adolescent boys get a bit older, they will find that they have their own tightrope to walk: being sensitive and ‘evolved’ enough, but not ‘weak’ or ‘wimpy’ or ‘a pushover’.

Well, anyway. When I was a little girl of seven or eight, I discovered my mother’s copy of Miriam Stoppard’s Pregnancy and Birth Book, and pored over the page showing those sex positions which are more comfortable during pregnancy. When I was nine, I discovered my uncle’s copy of Nancy Friday’s Men In Love and his Penthouse Collected Stories, and pored over these, too. None of this, including the stories about sex with dogs, did me the slightest harm, and it may have done some good. I sure wasn’t getting sex education anywhere else. But this stuff was friendly and pleasant and sex-positive — it wasn’t the wildly unrealistic and very often misogynistic depictions of bodies and sex that are standard in mainstream porn these days, and that I would be kind of worried about a nine-year-old seeing. I wish that friendly, pleasant, sex-positive porn was standard instead — if it were, I’d have no problem with a nine-year-old seeing it.

But fourteen? Fourteen is well old enough to form your own opinions about what you see. I’m reminded of Malle’s Le Souffle au coeur, in which the fourteen-year-old protagonist reads The Story of O. Fourteen-year-olds have always sought out that kind of thing, it’s just that we have a new medium for it now.

The outcome of all this ‘sexting’ blah blah blah experimenting wink wink nudge nudge is usually among younger ‘adolescents’ 13-16 spooning sleepover 4-6 in one bed getting a feel (no pun intended) for which of them might be gay or straight or bi or whatever . . . I mean, that’s how they’re finding out these days . . . commonly shared and communicated and disseminated and faced and decided and lives and relationships planned on that basis . . .